Except for blacks. And women. And natives. And … uh, never mind.

Let’s consider, say, the year 1880. Here was a society in which people were free to keep everything they earned, because there was no income tax. They were also free to decide what to do with their own money—spend it, save it, invest it, donate it, or whatever. People were generally free to engage in occupations and professions without a license or permit. There were few federal economic regulations and regulatory agencies. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, bailouts, or so-called stimulus plans. No IRS. No Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. No EPA and OSHA. No Federal Reserve. No drug laws. Few systems of public schooling. No immigration controls. No federal minimum-wage laws or price controls. A monetary system based on gold and silver coins rather than paper money. No slavery. No CIA. No FBI. No torture or cruel or unusual punishments. No renditions. No overseas military empire. No military-industrial complex.

As a libertarian, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a society that is pretty darned golden.

—has been ablymet by the appropriatechoruses of “are you high?’ Because you’re leaving out African Americans, and women, and whole classes of people who didn’t enjoy this vaunted liberty.

But this is a tedious and silly argument even if we stick to looking at honky men.

(1) In 1880, you had a protective tariff, a.k.a. industrial policy, a.k.a. machinery for corruption by taking the voters’ money, such that tariff duties collected ran to about thirty percent of the value of imports (as opposed to around 2 percent today). It’s worth noting that the argument for an income tax was not just to punish the rich for making so much money; it was to replace the tariff as a source of federal revenue.

(2) In 1880, you had powerful governments willing to break strikes and extensively regulate business practices; these governments make up a strange class of entities that in this country we know as states and their powers are visible in the 1873 Slaughterhouse cases, as elsewhere.

(3) In 1880 you had restrictions on immigration under the Page Act of 1875, keeping out convicts and prostitutes (hey, if you’re going to be a libertarian) and also creating a permitting system for Chinese and Japanese immigrants. This latter provision was prelude to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Noting that leads finally to

(4) Picking 1880 is a bit of a con anyway; by 1882 you do have the Chinese Exclusion Act, and as recently as 1877 you still had the remnants of something resembling an activist government working on behalf of civil rights in the South.

So even if you grant all the wacky, racist, sexist premises here, and discount items 1-3 above, you’re still looking at a five-year anomaly 1877-1882, rather than the normal way things used to be.

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He also ignores the local police and carcerial system. In the 1880s, local police made extensive use of the “third degree,” i.e. torture, to obtain confessions from those accused of crimes.

In the South, individuals could be sent to the prison farm or chain gang if they could not pay fines or court costs. This meant individuals (white and black) accused of misdemeanors were sentenced to hard labor without benefit of jury trial.

Once in stir, these individuals were whipped and tortured for minor infractions and worked literally to death. In 1873, 25% of all black leased convicts in the U.S. died.

Finally, many accused criminals never got a chance to be worked to death, lynching of both whites and blacks was quite common.

So who dismantled this system? It would be Progressives, and especially the Cold War liberals of the Warren Court.

Aside from the incredibly tendentious points of “No overseas military empire,” “No torture or cruel or unusual punishment,” and “No immigration controls,” there are several things I just don’t get about the libertarian talking points: “No EPA and no OSHA. … Few systems of public schooling. … A monetary system based on gold and silver coins rather than paper money.”

Machines lopping off limbs, industrial waste in drinking water, and an ignorant national populace are all desirable? And agreeing to pretend that certain shiny and heavy rocks are the most valuable things rather than agreeing to pretend that certain colored bits of paper are is really, really important?

Just to sum up: freedom is a frakking complicated idea that no one can define anyway. Let’s A. not accept the libertarian ideal of freedom and B. understand that for many people freedom is premised on the reduction of someone else’s freedom.

Point is the libertarians might be revealing more than they intended when they said that the 1880s were free. They were free for white men, exactly because they weren’t free for women, or immigrants, or Southern blacks, or, more or less anyone else.

The hidden premise of this and similar arguments is always “None of the benefits of my present circumstances depends on government regulation.” Thus, the libertarian simply has to hold those benefits constant and select the nearby possible world with the lower tax rate.

It’s amazing how much can be swept under the carpet of all-else-being-equal.

No one else has gone quite this way, but Caplan’s argument that women were more free despite being counted as property would suggest that, mutatis mutandis, the average whiny libertarian today is more free, despite being constrained in ways amounting to much less than coverture.

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

Like I said in the original Holbo thread — “In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before — and thus was the Empire forged. Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor — at least, no one worth speaking of.”

I offended a fellow in another thread recently by labeling some congressman’s strategy as “childish.” (I have forgotten who — there are so many.)

But as I pointed out, there are some strategies that show up in childhood, and are mostly abandoned as the child grows up. When children use them, it’s normal. When grownups use them, they ought to be scolded and sent to their rooms, or at least taught better.

This libertarian fallacy of “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine” (I make my own decisions! Don’t tell me what to do! You make me do everything around here! And where’s my pizza?!) generally shows up around age 12 to 15 and is not only normal but probably necessary to get the kid to ever leave the nest. None of us usually look at our environment and calculate the ceaseless labour of countless others which keeps that environment ticking. But before an adult begins pronouncing about removing the load-bearing walls of society, he’d darn well better understand what that means.

Why wonder confusedly if men were free in the 1880s? Let’s ask people who were there? People named, say, August Spies and Albert Parsons and Johann Most. I’ve forgotten some of my 1880s history, but as I remember there was a pretty large movement against the state in that period. Some of them marched around in quasi-military arrangements, some of them threw bombs, some of them were merely “bomb-talkers.” The Chicago and New York anarchists seemed to have understood that they were not as free as the latter-day libertarians are claiming.

I asked this question over at Crooked Timber but didn’t get any real responses, so I thought I would ask it again and see if any one here had any thoughts:

“It seems to me that in the last couple of decades the debate about the question of liberty (the question of what impedes our liberty, what keeps us from being free) has shifted ground. The public debate has moved from the problem of political exclusion to the problem of economic regulation….the point of my post was simply that I don’t think, [a few years ago], a public debate about freedom or liberty would have included discussion of marginal tax rates. And I think that is an interesting development in the history of the idea of liberty in America”

Ok, so excerpted here it doesn’t sound like a question, but here is the drift: Is this an actual shift in the history of the idea of liberty? Or is it a co-opting of the term “liberty” by a small but vocal group on the far right (like they did with the word “patriot”)? Or am I just too young to remember that this idea of economic liberty as paramount pops up from time to time when the Left is in power and the economy in recession, and then other conceptions of liberty (say, those that view the CRA of 1964 as a greater boost to liberty than the defeat of public health insurance) pop back up when the economy rights itself?

For the record, I got the quick (and, in retrospect, obvious) smackdown: “I’m not so sure. The original break with England was over taxes, right?” Snap. But at least that was “no taxation without representation”…so at least it had the flavor of political exclusion at its core, and not merely economic self-interest.

I’ve noticed libertarians don’t know much history, and what they know is mostly wrong. Is that the flip side of all history departments being infested with those pesky liberals? It seems the more history you know, the more interested you get in the people who lived it, and then one can’t really be a proper libertarian. Kind of like matter and anti-matter.

The go-to guy on the concepts (or banners, really) of “liberty” and “freedom” in American history is David Hackett Fisher. In Albion’s Seed and Liberty and Freedom he does a kind of multivariate analysis of American rhetoric and culture, and finds 4 different factors, each associated with a wave of immigrants from a particular region of the British Isles.

Fischer’s matrix:

1. the Ordered Liberty of New England Puritans: stressing the freedom of a community to order itself, and freedom from the press of circumstance upon members of the community. It is the freedom of the town meeting.

2. the Hegemonic Liberty of Tidewater Anglicans: in which freedom from restraint increases as one looks up the social scale. Fischer quotes a Virginia planter who said: “I am an aristocrat: I love liberty; I hate democracy.”

3.the Reciprocal Liberty of Delaware Valley Quakers: especially freedom of conscience even for non-Quakers. It was perhaps the first time in human history that a persecuted people escaped persecution and “extended to others … precisely the same rights that they had demanded for themselves”.

4. the Natural Liberty of the non-conformist Backcountry: freedom from too many obligations, even to family; thought of as humanity’s natural state. A search for “elbow room” or for wealth, without much regard for connections or community.

For quite a few years now Fischer has said he’s working on a book called “The Ebony Tree: African Folkways in America”. This would fill the greatest gap in his taxonomy of American freedom and American culture. My guess is that the missing piece is:

5. the Transformative Liberty of African Americans: freedom that is a journey, a process, for both individual and community. Freedom that you have to work for or climb to, eyes on the prize.

To get back to your question, jrc, I think the right-libertarians vary between Hegemonic Liberty and Natural Liberty. Hegemonic Liberty is elitist — only the best people, the John Galts, should be completely free. Natural Liberty is a free-for-all, every man out for his own interests. Hegemonic Liberty is more plutocratic, Natural Liberty emphasizes a completely free and unfettered market.

Fischer’s analysis emphasizes that the American concepts of “freedom” or “liberty” were *never* coherent or unified, and it’s not that a single idea has changed, but that different components have been more or less emphasized and combined in different periods and regions. Current libertarian liberty does not corner the American freedom market, because nothing can.

The thing I always find baffling about these arguments is that they demonstrate exactly the opposite of what libertarians set out to prove.

Take their potted history as accurate, and what you have is a story of an 1880 America in joyous, untrammeled libertarianness . . . deciding it really, really didn’t like all that libertude. That is, the reason America today doesn’t look like the libertarians’ 1880 is because those fully liberfied Americans, having experienced libertarian nirvana, traded it in for something that smelled less like teen spirit. And every generation of Americans since has done the same; hence our steady march to Marxist totalitarian Islam.

We don’t have 1880 America because Americans don’t want a libertarian society. Since every libertarian I’ve ever talked to has insisted just the opposite — that if the American people ever got a taste of true liberty, there would be no turning them back from it — it’s difficult for me to comprehend why they keep cranking out this stuff.

Wouldn’t the smarter historical move be to say Americans have never experienced the joys of true liberty? Do libertarians have some argument that the libertarian will of the people has been systemically and unremittingly perverted for the past 130 years?

If so, what the heck kind of wussy philosophy is this libertarianism, anyway? Man up! (Oh, wait.)

There’s also the distinction between the freedom of a man to govern his household, run his business, and dispose of his property (all seen as unilateral actions) — as opposed to the freedom of a citizen to occupy civic space and claim the equal protection of the laws regardless of his or her position in a household, workplace or society.

Put more simply, is “freedom” the freedom of powerful figures to dominate their private domains, or is it the non-hierarchical freedom of equals?

That is, the reason America today doesn’t look like the libertarians’ 1880 is because those fully liberfied Americans, having experienced libertarian nirvana, traded it in for something that smelled less like teen spirit.

I don’t know what you mean by “also”, there. The first is what Fischer (in Albion’s Seed) calls “Hegemonic Liberty”, the second is “Ordered Liberty”. In Liberty and Freedom he calls the first “liberty” and the second “freedom”, but personally I find the distinction confusing.

I rather think the point there is that, as late as the C18, and deriving from renaissance revivals of classical republicanism, some people really did think that freedom lay in their right to boss less worthy people around. In the social conditions of the C18, this was quite a reasonable, if self-serving, thing to think, if you happened to be in the appropriate social position. What is truly astonishing is that anyone might think that the views of a slaveowner and a member of the landed gentry in 1750 have any relevance to the running of a complex, individualistic, urban and technological society today.

We might describe liberty as “the condition of having use and ownership of the fruits of ones own efforts.”

Now, this sounds a lot like what I think of as the libertarian ideal, but there’s a catch that alters the look of it.

Keeping the phrase “the fruits of ones own efforts,” we must also be able to utilize the phrase “the fruits of the efforts of groups,” because human beings are most truly representatives of their species when they have organized themselves into productive groups.

With that in mind, we see that over the past 30 years the loss of American liberty has been profound, judged by the shifting of the “fruits” into the pockets of the few. Although overall productivity has grown a lot, more Americans are working, and working as hard as ever, for stalled wages and higher prices.

Anger is the correct response, of course, but we must be careful to address the true source of the loss of liberty, and not each other.

The quote does specifically mention immigration, though of course you may continue to accuse critics of “cherry picking,” since presumably that means “finding the weak parts of the argument.”

As for the “red herring” of bringing up history in a historical discussion, well, hey, now that you mention it, I guess the historical window-dressing in the quoted passage is really just there to bulk up what would otherwise be a one-liner of a sentiment: “Gee, I wish I didn’t have to pay income tax.”